The Walt Whitman Archive

Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: John Addington Symonds to Walt Whitman, 12 July 1877

Date: July 12, 1877

Whitman Archive ID: loc.04063

Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Transcribed from digital images or a microfilm reproduction of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.

I was away from England when your volumes reached me, & since my return (during the last six weeks) I have been very ill with an attack of hemorrhage from the lung—brought on while riding a pulling horse at a time when I was weak from cold.1 This must account for
my delay in writing to thank you for them & to express the great pleasure which your inscription in two of the volumes has given me.

I intend to put into my envelope a letter to you with some verses from one of your great admirers in England.2 It is my nephew—
the second son of my sister who married Sir Edward Strachey, a Somersetshire baronet.3 I gave him a copy of Leaves of Grass in 1874, & he knows a great portion of it now by heart. Though still so young, he has developed a considerable faculty for writing & is an enthusiastic student
of literature as well as a frank vigorous lively young fellow. I thought you might like to see how some of the youth of England is being drawn toward you.

Believe me always sincerely & affectionately yours
J. A. Symonds.

St. Loe writes so bad a hand that I shall transcribe his verses for him

I

Thine is no Carol of weak love or hate;Thine is no Song by listless idler Sung;No poor attempt to cheat us from our fate;No shallow words from shallower fancies wrung.These are not thine; thy music pure is flungFrom out a heart that throbs & pants, which achesWith its great love: our Suffering role amongThou com'st with thy great gift of song that makesAll things seem bright & clear,all lovelier vision wakes.

II

Though now the world is deaf & will not hear,Though now the foolish rail & sneer at theeIt matters not: their frowns thou dost not fearThou know'st the day will come the
[illegible]When thou in love with Him of GalileeShalt have thy place. Not yet, The years must wane,And thought from Superstition's curse be free:When this is ended, thou with him shalt reign[Strong?] in all hearts, as loved, asmighty brothers twain.

St. Loe Strachey

Notes:

1. John Addington Symonds, a
prominent biographer, literary critic, and poet in Victorian England, was in his
time most famous as the author of the seven-volume history Renaissance in Italy. But in the smaller circles of the emerging
upper-class English homosexual community, he was also well known as a writer of
homoerotic poetry and a pioneer in the study of homosexuality, or sexual
inversion as it was then known (Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings [New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998], 701). [back]

3. John St. Loe Strachey
(1860–1927) was a British journalist, and for a time was the editor of The Spectator. He was the second son of Sir Edward
Strachey and Mary Isabella Symonds, sister of John Addington Symonds. [back]